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Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story
avitzur writes with a link to the story behind the Macintosh Graphing Calculator. An excerpt from this strange account: "It's midnight. I've been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I'm not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I'm evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer's main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation."
Ummm, the story being told took place nearly 10 years ago
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.
classic...
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
>No, the graphing calculator doesn't come with OS X. :)
It is available for OS X now. You can download the free release from http://www.PacificT.com/FreeStuff.html (Well, at least you will be able to after the server recovers from the Slashdot Effect.
> a company that canned me
No. There was a line in the story that got dropped on the editing room floor. I was offered a job as an employee on a new project when the old project was cancelled. I just wasn't interested in the new project. I prefered to be working on educational software.
Find the Calculator icon in the Finder, and select "Get Info" (or press Command-I after clicking on the calculator). In the plug-ins section, select the "Add" button, and in the resulting file dialog, browser your way to the Calculator -> Contents -> Resources. Select any/all of the *.calcview directories, and press "Choose". Presto -- open the Calculator and select the "View" menu item, and your new plug-in views will be available.
Now for the caveat. Ever since one of the 10.3 updates (10.3.3 maybe?), none of the plug-ins work anymore. But in the event they ever fix this, you now know how to activate different view modes.
I doubt that the graphing capability built into the calculator has anything to do with the Graphing Calculator application, as the one built into the regular Calculator is supposedly 2D only, whereas the Graphing Calculator supports 3D graphs as well.
Yaz.
Uh, you most certainly could buy compilers and tools such as Macintosh Programmers Workshop, ThinkC and ThinkPascal from Symantec, and Codewarrior from Metrowerks. I was exclusively a Mac programmer from 1985 - 1996.
.exe, .txt, .doc, etc. MacOS has meta-data about each file - a 4 digit code identifying the file type, and a 4 digit code identifying the file that created it (which allows for some neat capabilities such as having two files of the same type, but opened by different applications when they are double-clicked on.)
The 'extension' of which you speak is equivalent to the file extensions under dos, like
The only reason you had to 'register' an extention with Apple was so other applications could know, for sure, what kind of file an extention represented. There is nothing to stop anyone from using any code they desired, just as there is nothing to stop me from naming a file with an ending like '.dll' under dos/windows... it just isn't a prudent thing to do.
I'm too lazy to figure out what my account is, so I guess I'm an anonymous coward, but I worked with Ron at the time, and still hang out with him. The story is true, and NuCalc/Graphing Calculator got started just as he describes. I even have the embroidered NuCalc shirt he gave me as a memento.
Now, should you see anything similar in some upcoming release of some unspecified operating system, check to see whether it's the real deal (Graphing Calculator from PacificT http://www.pacifict.com/Gallery.html), or something else.
Actually Microsoft has a hardware accelerated UI in Windows XP. Read up on GDI+. Also, for newer cards with real programmable GPUs (pretty much Ati 9000, and nVidia FX and up) they use the shaders to accelerate Windows Media playback.
Either way, I'm not so sure the UI acceleration thing was a blinding flash of the obvious, I think it was more hardware needing to get to a certian point. It wasn't until about mid 1999 that a card (TNT2) existed that even had the basic 3d capibility to do what would be needed for a user interface. Even so, at that level, all you could really do was make a window a big texture stretched on a polygon. Neat, but faily useless.
Real useful UI acceleration didn't become feasable until cards became Graphics Processing Units in fact, which means some programability. The GeForce 3, which came about in 2001, was the first consumer level card that could be really considered for that.
So I don't think it was an idea that really had to think in. I remember hearing people musing about using the Voodoos for UI acceleration (and having those more knowledgable tell them why that wouldn't work), I think it was just a matter of the hardware advancing to a point where it was sufficiently useful for things other than playing games.
That is 1.4b3. It is still in beta testing. We're still working on it. I need to do is fix those example files which were created for the full version. If you type y=x^2 into a new empty document, it will work. For a comparison of the features in 1.4 vs. 3.5, see http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html. The 150-page PDF book, "Learning Math" in the help menu is almost entirely devoted to the features of the free version. You can download that by itself or browse it at http://www.pacifict.com/Books.html